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So you’ve spent a few hours downloading the latest re-released VPC of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 only to find that the Customer Portal and Partner Portal samples are broken.

For example, when you try to launch the Partner Portal (under xRM Portals in IE favorites bar) you get the following message:

I’m certain Microsoft will post a fix soon but in the mean time I’ve done some digging and found a solution. The portal files are already deployed and you just need to point the IIS applications to the correct folders on your disk.

On your VPC desktop you’ll find a shortcut named “Accelerators”, open it and you’ll find oyur portals.

Open IIS management console.

Right click “Partner Portal” and select Properties.

Under the Home Directory tab paste this path:

Click Apply.

Now do the same for the “Partner Portal” application, the path is: C:\Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0\Accelerators\CUSTOMER_PORTAL_RTW_R1\Installation\Website\Customer-Portal-R2\Website

Hope this helps.

So you’ve spent half a day downloading the latest re-released VPC of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 only to find that the Customer Portal and Partner Portal samples are broken.

For example, when you try to launch the Partner Portal (under xRM Portals in IE favorites bar) you get the following error message:

I’m certain Microsoft will post a fix soon but in the mean time I’ve done some digging and found a solution. The portal files are already deployed and you just need to point the IIS applications to the correct folders on your disk. On your VPC desktop you’ll find a shortcut named “Accelerators”, open it and you’ll find your portals.

I think by now I already installed Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 at least 4 or 5 times but today was the first time I encountered this message:

In reality, VS2010 installed successfully though there was some failure installing the Silverlight SDK. I would expect this sort of result to be conveyed differently, hopefully this would change for the RTM version.

If you’re using Dynamics CRM Developer Toolkit it’s worth noting that when you specify a username and password in the Server Connection settings (CRM Explorer Options in Visual Studio) the password is stored in the registry in plain text.

This may not be a big issue for many developers, even when an administrator user is used, since most developers usually know the administrator password or are administrators themselves at least on dev\test environments, but still this is something you should be aware of.

If you’re concerned about this and cannot connect to your CRM server using default credentials, you can simply leave the password field blank and switch to default credentials every time you’re done working with the toolkit. This will clear the password registry key until the next time you wish to connect.

Personally I prefer using RSS readers which come in the form of client applications rather than online services. My favorite for many years was Omea Reader but unfortunately ever since JetBrains stopped working on it and made it open source, the product development is simply stuck. Combined with a few annoying bugs, I am gradually pushed towards looking for a replacement.

I haven’t settled on anything yet but lately I decided to give RSS Bandit another try. So, while working with it I thought it would be nice to add a “Share on Friendfeed” functionality. RSS Bandit supports the IBlogExtension plugin interface, and following Dare Obasanjo’s del.icio.us sample made it very easy to develop a Friendfeed plugin.

The IBlogExtension framework is supported by other RSS aggregators so this plugin may work with other applications but I only tested it with RSS Bandit. Let me know if you successfully use it with other apps.

Download and Installation

Configuration

1. Right click any RSS feed item and then click “Share on Friendfeed – Configure”.

2. Enter your Friendfeed username and remote key (you can get it here).

3. Check the “Display confirmation” checkbox if you want to see a notification dialog after posting to Friendfeed.

Sharing Items on FriendFeed

1. Right click the feed item you want to share and then click “Share on Friendfeed”.

2. You can edit the URL and title (both are populated automatically from the feed item) and add your comment, before hitting the Post button.

3. If you checked the confirmation box in the configuration dialog, you’ll receive a confirmation message with a link to your newly posted entry.

Disclaimer

This is the very first version of the plugin. It is provided “as is” and under the “works on my machine” terms and conditions. I tested the plugin with RSS Bandit version 1.8.0.870 under Windows XP SP2.

Here’s a little test I performed. About two months ago I deleted an entry which had an image attached to it. I noted the URL of the uploaded image (the location where FF stored it on Amazon S3 storage service).

I checked this URL a few hours later, the next day, next week and so on, assuming there’s some sort of garbage collection process that would delete this resource, but the image is still there at the time of writing. I have repeated this test more than once.

This raises a few concerns:

Potential exploit #1 – someone who wants to save on their site’s bandwidth costs can store images on FF at no cost.

Potential exploit #2 – storing files on Amazon S3 costs FF money (currently $0.15 a month per 1GB), so if someone wants to increase FF’s monthly bill they can just dump a lot of large photos there. Not to mention bandwidth costs (think Digg homepage kind of traffic).

An entry you delete might not really be deleted – if FF doesn’t bother deleting these binary resources, one may assume the text is kept as well, which is a bit of a problem if you shared something by mistake and wouldn’t want it popping up in the future.

Of course this could all just be a bug and these images should have been deleted in the first place. I’m just speculating here.

FriendFeed has a very clean design but it doesn’t utilize wide screen real estate. On a 24″ display using 1920×1200 pixel resolution, you can show at least two columns of FF feeds and still have some room to spare.

I’m not sure how to balance width vs. scroll. Having two columns can be confusing, and I certainly don’t want to scroll down to read the left column only to scroll up again to read the right one. However I’m sure this screen real estate can be used in some way to enhance my productivity.

Maybe something along the lines of the Pagerization Greasemonkey script, only horizontal? Still thinking about it. In the meantime I’ll just keep scrolling down.

I’m still fine tuning my crawler but below you’ll find the top 250 most followed users as calculated from data collected at the end of June. All previously mentioned limitations still apply. The percentage is calculated against the active public users discovered in this crawl, which is 52137 users (8143 users are private, and the current grand total is 60280).

Terminology

I changed my terminology from “active” to “most followed” as it better describes what this is all about. When I use the term “active” I mean “discoverable”, and it doesn’t matter if a person actually does anything on FF as long as his feed keeps flowing in. If she streams her twitter activity to FF but doesn’t set foot in FF, she will still be picked up by my crawler because her twitter activity contributes to her FF feed.

Margin of error or coverage limitations

Occasionally FF users mention how many followers they have. I tried comparing these numbers with my limited data and it seems to fit well within the estimated 15-20% margin.

For example, take a look at this entry and notice the numbers reported there by Susan Mernit and Jeremiah Owyang. Susan reports 1290 followers, I was able to discover 1055. Jeremiah reports 1979 followers, I was able to discover 1578.

Also, as far as the “big guys” go, I’m sure I’m missing a lot more than 15-20% which is natural given their popularity. There are probably a lot of dormant/inactive users who simply follow Scoble and Arrington without contributing anything to the feed (which makes them non-discoverable by my crawler).

The top 250

So, here is the top 250 list. As you can see, it goes “long tail” pretty fast.